Thomas Lee's collection of random interesting items, views on things, mainly IT related, as well as
the occasional rant

Monday, March 04, 2019

It's Done! So now what??

Last week, I completed work on a new PowerShell book. The book is entitled Windows Server 2019 Automation with PowerShell. The front cover looks like this:

One of the more interesting features the more eagle-eyed viewers might notice is that Jeffrey Snover wrote a forward. I've known Jeffrey for a very long time and admire him enormously. The draft of his foreword reads like this:

Of course, I love it and am immensely flattered. I just hope the book lives up to his introduction.

The book contains over 120 'recipes' - small scripts that do useful things. I have tried to strip out some of the overhead normally associated with production scripting (error handling, logging, firewalls, etc.) to concentrate on the essence of the various features and how to manage them with PowerShell. The scripts are also published on Github at: https://github.com/doctordns/PowerShellCookBook2019.

I learned a lot in the process of writing this book. It was fun delving down into various aspects of Windows Server 2019 and playing with various features. Being able to log performance data then graph it all in a few lines of code was neat.

A major resource in writing this latest book was https://docs.microsoft.com. This is Microsoft's (largely) open source documentation platform. The documents are, in the main, of an excellent standard. And when I found a page that has an error or was unclear - I just fixed it. Highly satisfying to improve the documentation.

The book is now available on Amazon: https://smile.amazon.com/Windows-Server-Automation-PowerShell-Cookbook/dp/1789808537/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1551353410&sr=8-3